According to Conor Grogan, product head at Coinbase, the ether rose to 913,111 ETH as user errors and bugs rose to 913,111 ETH.
Grogan shared the X estimate on Sunday, noting that lost ether (ETH) from human error accounts for more than $3.43 billion at current market prices.
After 2021, if 5.3 million ETHs are destroyed via Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559 (EIP-1559), the percentage of lost ETHs will be even higher.
sauce: Connor Grogan
The total amount of ether (ETH of about 6.2 million ($23.4 billion) including ETH burned in EIP-1559) accounts for 5% of 107 million cases, Grogan said.
Ether supply has skyrocketed at 44% since March 2023
A similar report from March 2023 shows that the amount of ether supply due to bugs and user errors has skyrocketed 44% from the reported 636,000 ETH at the time.
Despite the surge, the biggest sources of loss remain largely the same, with the latest report citing the same major incident highlighted in the March 2023 analysis.
Both reports specifically mentioned the parity multi-sig bug in Web3 Foundation, 306,000 ETH loss due to contract failure due to Quadriga’s 60,000 ETH loss and Akutars’ 11,500 ETH loss due to Akutars’ 11,500 ETH loss with inappropriate tokens (NFTs) false mint.
The only amount that has changed since then is forwarding to a burn address with 1,000 ETH added.
Connor Grogan’s latest ether supply loss report and similar reports for March 2023. Source: Connor Grogan
“To be clear, this $3.4 billion number is taking a significant amount of actual lost/inaccessible ETH amounts, which only covers the case where Ethereum is locked forever,” Grogan wrote in a latest report.
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“We don’t cover all the private keys that were lost, or the forgotten Genesis wallet, for example,” he added.
Cointelegraph approached Grogan for comments on its biggest contributors about the surge in ETH supply losses since March 2023, but it received no responses from the publication.
Ethereum supply is flexible
Unlike Bitcoin (BTC), whose supply closes at 21 million coins, Ether does not have a hard cap in its total supply.
Still, ETH issuance is significantly constrained by two major upgrades: EIP-1559 and Merge.
Introduced as part of the London Hard Fork in August 2021, the EIP-1559 burned some of the transaction fees to change Ethereum’s fee mechanism, effectively reducing circulating supply over time.
The merge completed in September 2022 shifted the Ethereum network from Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Certificates (POS), resulting in a significant drop in new ETH issuance.
Ethereum supply from July 2020 onwards. Source: YCHARTS
According to data from YCHARTS, Ethereum supply steadily increased between 2020 and 2022, reaching 120 million ETH by September 2022.
Supply then began to decline, falling by about 0.4% by April 2024, reflecting a decline in issuance and ongoing ETH burns. Since then, supply has resumed gradual growth, reaching ETH of around 120 million at the time of writing.
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